Course Overview

What this Microsoft SQL Server course covers, how to use it, prerequisites.

A structured, hands-on course on Microsoft SQL Server and T-SQL. It runs from first principles to expert-level administration, performance tuning, high availability, security, and the newest SQL Server 2022/2025 and Azure SQL features.

Course Overview

Students, developers, data analysts, data engineers, aspiring DBAs

Basic computer literacy. No prior database experience required.

~120–150 hours (self-paced), 8–12 weeks SQL Server 2022/2025 Developer Edition (free), SSMS 21+, VS Code with the MSSQL extension Sample DBs

AdventureWorks2022, WideWorldImporters, StackOverflow (for performance work), and the course ShopDB Course Sample Database: ShopDB

Most examples in this course use this schema. Create it in Module 5.

Beginner        →  Intermediate      →  Programming     →  Advanced Data
(Modules 1–8)      (Modules 9–17)       (Modules 18–26)    (Modules 27–31)
                                                               ↓
Cloud/Modern    ←  Administration    ←  Performance & Internals
(Modules 49–56)    (Modules 41–48)      (Modules 32–40)

Customers (CustomerID PK, FirstName, LastName, Email, City, Country, CreatedAt)
Categories (CategoryID PK, CategoryName, ParentCategoryID FK → Categories)
Products  (ProductID PK, ProductName, CategoryID FK, UnitPrice, Stock, IsActive)
Employees (EmployeeID PK, FullName, ManagerID FK → Employees, HireDate, Salary, DeptID)
Orders    (OrderID PK, CustomerID FK, EmployeeID FK, OrderDate, Status, ShipCity)
OrderItems(OrderID FK, ProductID FK, Quantity, UnitPrice, Discount)  PK(OrderID, ProductID)